Engaging Students in Critical Dialogue Through Dance and Discourse: A Case Illustration of Immigrant Stories

• In Event: Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum of the Oppressed: Liberating Spaces Through Cultural Representations

Abstract

Engaging today’s youth in critical dialogue of contentious issues remains both an essential element in democratically-oriented education and extremely challenging to facilitate. The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate the ways in which dance helped students in a one-week workshop and pilot study for teacher practitioner/graduate students to understand and engage with immigration issues, allowing them to visualize and create emotional connections to historical events and people. Videotaped pre- and post- workshop interviews with participants illuminate how the creative learning community generated from the dance activities provided a space for discussions in which people were open to expressing different opinions and perspectives and in which they experienced empathy for the migrants in the stories they re-created.

Authors

• Theresa Catalano, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

• Alison E Leonard, Clemson University